de Young Artist Studio

Every month the museum invites artists to install and demonstrate their art form at the de Young. This interactive program enables visitors to meet artists and gives the artists an opportunity to work with the public. Artists working in various media are encouraged to apply.

How do we live? We exist simultaneously between seconds that can be apocalyptic and graceful, minutes that are mediocre, and hours that stand still. History records these occurrences in ink, pressed between pages in books, placed above us, out of reach. But a tradition that relies on the mechanical application of time recognition, and groups our experiences into singular episodes with no intersections cannot truly document our lives.

During his residency, Rodney Ewing questions, through text and works on paper, how we view time, memory, and history as linear and isolated constructs instead of concurrent moments. Days and Occasions will consist of text applied directly to walls with graphite. Each line of events/moments/observations is separated by increments of time that run parallel to each other to emphasize the analogous nature of our reality.

Days and Occassions will be applied to a long role of paper and wrapped around the walls with video screen displays. The works on paper will function as a new screen where images will be projected to interact with text, recording what happens between the minutes and seconds, the sublime to the ridiculous, the tragic and the beautiful, in order to create a more intimate account than what we are subjected to in our daily lives. Ewing thus creates a specific site that has to be navigated both physically and conceptually.

Visitors will be invited to contribute their own “Days and Occasions” by stenciling directly on the wall of the gallery. The goal of the project is to have a physical record of the simultaneous and overlapping nature of our mutual existence.

Rodney Ewing is a San Francisco-based artist. He received his BFA at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and his MFA at West Virginia University. His drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on intersecting body and place, memory and fact, in order to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. His work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the University of San Francisco, Alter Space, Pro Arts Gallery, SomArts, ASC Projects, Root Division, Ictus Projects, de Saisset Museum, Frey Norris Gallery, Lisa Dent Gallery, Dog Patch Gallery, The African American Art and Cultural Complex, Performance Art Institute, San Francisco Public Library Main Branch, Swarm Gallery, and Kala Art Institute, and nationally at The Drawing Center (New York), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles), Johnsonese Gallery (Chicago), Richmond Center for Visual Arts (Kalamazoo), Beta Pictoris Gallery (Birmingham), and Greymatter Gallery (Milwaukee).

The Artist Studio program is made possible with major support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Museums for America program.

Artist Studio Blog

The views expressed in the Artist Studio Blog are those of the participating artists-in-residence at the de Young, and do not reflect the opinions or viewpoints of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Corinne Okada Takara completed a residency in the Kimball Education Gallery two years ago. Her project, Rhythms in Space, explored the assembly of recycled materials into airy three-dimensional tapestries and wearable art, while presenting a visual footprint of diverse cultures in the Asian diaspora. She pulled various motifs from the museum collection, along with visual patterns observed in

It began 6 years ago as a vehicle to transcend sadness on the loss of my father, Paul Ewing, when I found myself painting and doing collages I called “Spirit Boats” as a tribute to his memory. Like a stone thrown into a pond, the ripples moved outward as my work grew with personal references.